Crybbe

CHAPTER III

Not one person had appeared to recognize Guy Morrison. Twice today he'd circuited this dreary town, and nobody had done more than glance at him with, he was forced to admit, a barely cursory interest.

Guy liked to be recognized. He needed to be recognized. He was insecure, he readily admitted this. Everyone he knew in television was insecure; it was a deeply neurotic business. And it was a visual medium – so if people started to pass you in the street without a second, sidelong glance, without nudging their companions, then it wouldn't be too long before the Programme Controller failed to recognize you in the lift.

Altogether, a legitimate cause for anxiety.

And Fay had depressed him. Living like a spinster, watching her father coming unravelled, in the kind of conditions Guy remembered from his childhood – remembered only in black and white, like grainy old 405-line television. He couldn't understand why Fay had failed to throw herself at him, sobbing, 'Take me away from all this', instead of bustling off with her Uher over her shoulder in pursuit of a local news item that would be unlikely to make even a filler-paragraph in tomorrow's Sunday papers.

Guy, rather than attempt to construct a conversation with the Canon, had claimed to be overdue for another appointment, and thus had ended up making his second despondent tour the town centre.

Country towns were not supposed to be like this. Country towns were supposed to have teashops and flower stalls and Saturday markets from which fat, friendly Women's Institute ladies sold jars of home-made jam and chutney sealed by grease-proof paper and rubber bands.

Without a crew, without Catrin and her clipboard and without even a hint of recognition from the public, Guy felt a sudden sense of acute isolation. He'd never been anywhere quite like this before, a town which seemed to have had all the life sucked out of it, bloodless people walking past, sagging like puppets whose strings had been snipped.

He was almost inclined to cancel his room at the Cock and race back home to Cardiff.

Instead, in the gloomy late-afternoon, as it began to rain again, he found himself strolling incuriously into 'The Gallery' where he and Jocasta Newsome would soon recognize a mutual need.

Outside, Powys had found some logs for the Jotul stove. They were damp, but he managed to get the stove going and stacked a couple of dozen logs on each side of it to dry out.

He couldn't remember bleaker weather at the end of June.

His cases stood unpacked by the window. On the ledge, a blank sheet of A4 paper was wound into the Olivetti.

Life itself seemed very temporary tonight.

Just before seven, a grim-faced Rachel arrived, Barbour awash. She tossed the dripping coat on the floor.

'Coffee, J.M. I need coffee. With something in it.' She collapsed on to the hard, orange sofa, flung her head back, closing her eyes, 'I suppose you've heard?'

Powys said, They found a body in the river.'

Rachel said. 'What are you going to do, J.M.?'

'Do they know what happened?'

'I don't think so. They haven't questioned anyone except the father and Gomer Parry.'

Powys went into the little kitchen to look for coffee and called back, 'Have they found the gun?'

'Not so far as I know,' Rachel said. 'Perhaps Jonathon Preece didn't find it either. Perhaps the place where you threw it was deeper than you thought. Humble, who seems to know what he's talking about, says there are all kinds of unexpected pot-holes in the riverbed. He says nobody in their right mind would attempt to wade across, even in a dry summer, when the water level's low.'

'Humble?' Powys's voice had an edge of panic.

'He volunteered the information. In passing. I wasn't stupid enough to ask him. I feigned disinterest.'

Not a difficult act, he accepted, for Rachel.

He returned with two mugs and a bottle of Bell's whisky. 'I can't find any coffee, but I found this in a cupboard.' He poured whisky into a mug and handed it to Rachel. "Can't find any glasses either.'

Rachel drank deeply and didn't cough or choke.

Powys said, 'What do you think I ought to do?'

Rachel held the mug in both hands and stretched out her long legs to the stove in a vain quest for heat, 'I think we should wait for Fay. She's going to come here after she's filed her scrupulously objective story about the drowning tragedy at Crybbe.'

'That won't be easy. What's she going to say?'

'It seems,' said Rachel, 'that minor flooding at Crybbe has claimed its first victim.'

She looked tired. There were dark smudges on her narrow face. 'Just hope they don't find the gun. I don't know what water does to fingerprints, do you?'

As the second stroke of the curlew hit the reverberation of the first, clean and hard. Warren Preece tossed his used Durex, well-filled, into the alley and zipped up his jeans.

'Close,' he said. 'But I reckon I can improve on it if I puts my mind to it.'

Tessa Byford was leaning back against the brick wall of the Crybbe Unattended Studio, still panting a little. 'You're confident tonight.'

'Yeah.' The trick, he'd learned (he'd learned it from Tessa, but he'd allowed himself to forget this), was to time it so you came in the split second before the bell crashed. Tonight he'd lost his load a good five seconds before the first bong. Still near as buggery took the top of his head off, though – always did there – but it could be better.

Warren got a special kick out of thinking of his old man up the tower, waiting to pull on the rope while he, Warren, was in town here bonking his brains out. Dead on time again tonight: nothing would come between Jack Preece and that bell, not even his favourite son drying out in some police morgue.

'Ask not,' Warren intoned, 'for whom the ole bell tolls. It tolls tonight, ladies and gentlemen, for Jonathon Preece, of Crybbe.'

He giggled.

There was a snap of white – Tessa pulling up her knickers.

Warren said, 'I been feelin'- just lately, like – as I'm the only guy in this town, the only one who's really alive sorter thing. The only walkin' corpse in the graveyard. Bleeargh!"

Warren wiggled his hands and rolled his eyes.

Written two new songs, he had, in the past couple of days. R ed-hot stuff, too. Didn't know he had it in him – how much he had in him. He reckoned Max Golf's tape would be ready in a couple of weeks. Goff was going to be real blown away by his next one.

'What would you have done, Warren, if that woman hadn't come out of the studio before we got started? Or if she'd come out in the middle?'

'Woulda made no difference. Or I coulda saved some for 'er, couldn't I? Takin' a chance, she is, comin' yere this time a' night. An' she wouldn't say a word, see, 'cause I seen what 'appened by the river, 'ow they killed poor Jonathon. Poor Jonathon.'

Warren started to grin. 'Oh, you should've seen 'im, Tess. Lying there with 'is tongue out. Just about as wet and slimy as what 'e was when 'e was alive. I couldn't 'ardly keep a straight face. And – you got to laugh, see – fuckin' 'Young Farmers'…

Warren did laugh. He placed both hands flat on the brick wall and almost beat his head into it with laughing.

'… fuckin' Young Farmers' needs a new chairman now, isn't it? Oh, shit, what a bloody crisis!'

'You going to volunteer, Warren?'

'No.' Warren wiped his streaming eyes with the back of a hand. 'I'm goin' into the Plant Hire business.' He went into another cackle. 'I'm gonna hot-wire me a bulldozer.'

She was the kind of woman who, in normal circumstances, he would have taken care to avoid, like sunstroke. She was vain, pretentious, snobbish and too bony in the places where one needed it least.

But these were not normal circumstances. On a wet Saturday evening in Crybbe, Jocasta Newsome was almost exotic.

Guy had her on the hearthrug, where damp logs spat the occasional spark into his buttocks.

She was tasty.

And grateful. Guy loved people to be grateful for him. She was voracious in a carefree sort of way, as if all kinds of pent-up emotions were being expelled. She laughed a lot; he made her laugh, even with comments and questions that were not intended to be funny.

Like, 'And your husband – is he an artist?'

Jocasta squealed in delight and ground a pelvic bone fully into his stomach.

Guy said, just checking, 'You're sure there's no chance he'll be back tonight?'

'Tonight,' said Jocasta, 'Hereward will be in one of those awful restaurants where the candles on the tables are stuck in wine-bottles and some unshaven student is hunched up in the corner fumbling with a guitar. He'll be holding forth at length to a bunch of artists about the beauty of Crybbe and how well in he is with the local yokels. He'll be telling them all about his close friend Max Goff and the wonderful experiment in which he, Hereward, is playing a pivotal role. The artists will drink bottle after bottle of disgusting plonk paid for. of course, by Hereward and they'll think, "What a sucker, what an absolutely God-sent wally." And they'll be mentally doubling their prices.'

Jocasta propped herself up on one arm, her nipples rather redder than the feebly smouldering logs in the grate.

'Oh yes,' she assured him. 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got, Guy? Inches and inches, if I'm any judge. Oh my God, what am I saying, I must be demob happy.'

The thought of two whole days of Jocasta Newsome didn't lift Guy to quite the same heights. He reached for his trousers.

Dismay disfigured her. 'What are you doing? I didn't mean.. .'

'Just going to the loo, if you could direct me. Guy Morrison never goes anywhere without trousers. Not the kind of risk one takes.'

'Oh.' Jocasta relaxed. 'Yes. We're having a downstairs cloakroom made, but it isn't quite… Up the stairs, turn left and there's a bathroom directly facing you at the end of the passage. Don't be long, will you?'

Thankfully, she didn't qualify the final entreaty with another dreadful double entendre.

Guy slithered into his trousers and set off barefoot up the stairs, slightly worried now. Happily married women were fine. Unhappily married women were worse than unattached women. They clutched you as if you were a lifebelt. They were seldom afraid of word getting out about you and them. And while it might be all right for pop stars, scandal was rarely helpful to the careers of responsible producer-presenters in Features and Documentaries.

Bare-chested on the stairs, he shivered. The walls had been stripped to the stonework. Too rugged for Guy Morrison. He probably wouldn't come here again. He decided he'd open the exhibition tomorrow night and slide quietly away. A one-night stand was OK, but a two-night stand carried just a hint of commitment.

The lights went out.

'Oh, blast!' he heard from the drawing-room.

'What's happened?'

'Power cut,' Jocasta shouted. 'Happens all the time. Take it slowly and you'll be OK. When you get to the bathroom you'll find a torch on top of the cabinet.'

Guy stubbed his toe on the top banister-post and tried not to cry out.

But he found his way to the bathroom quite easily because of a certain greasy phosphorescence oozing out of the crack between the door and its frame.

'Funny sort of power cut,' he said, not thinking at all.

'Police say there are no suspicious circumstances, but they still can't explain how Mr Preece, whose family has been farming in the area for over four hundred years, came to be in the river.'

'That report,' the Offa's Dyke newsreader said, 'from Fay Morrison in Crybbe. Now sport, and for Hereford United…'

Fay switched off Powys's radio.

It was thirty-three minutes past ten and almost totally dark.

'Must've been awkward for you.' J. M. Powys rammed a freshly dried log into the Jotul and slammed the iron door on it.

Fay, in a black sweat-suit, was cross-legged on the hearth, by the stove.

'Not really,' she said, in cases like this you're not expected to probe too hard. If it had been a child, I'd be spending most of the night talking to worried mothers about why the council needed to fence off the river. Then tomorrow, this being Crybbe, I'd have to explain to Ashpole why the worried mothers were refusing to be interviewed on tape. But in a case like this, it's just assumed he killed himself. Be an open verdict. Unless…'

'Unless they find the gun.' Powys switched on a green-shaded table-lamp. Rachel drew the curtains against the night and the rain and the river.

Fay said, if anybody had any suspicions, we'd have heard from the police by now. All the same, Jack Preece…'

'His father,' Powys said.

'Yes. Jack Preece knows. I could see it in his eyes when we were down by the river, with the body.'

'Knows what?'

'I think he knows Jonathon had gone out to shoot Arnold.'

Rachel sat down on the sofa. 'What makes you…?'

'Just a minute. Hang on.' Powys stood up. 'You say Jonathon had gone out to shoot Arnold. You're saying he'd deliberately targeted Arnold?'

Fay nodded.

'Do I get the feeling there's a history to this?'

Fay swallowed, 'If I tell you this, you're going to switch to small talk for a few minutes and then look for an excuse to get rid of me. It's so weird.'

'Fay.' Powys spread his arms. 'I'm the bloke who wrote The Old Golden Land. Nothing's too weird.'

There was a longish silence. Then the green-shaded table-lamp went out.

'Bugger,' Rachel said.

'OK,' Fay said slowly. 'You can't see my face now, and I won't be able to see the incredulity on yours.'

She took a long breath. She told them about dogs in Crybbe.

'How long have you known this?' Powys asked.

'Only a day or so. I should be doing a story on it, shouldn't I? A town with no dogs' Jesus, it's not common, is it? But life here is so much like a bad dream, I'm sure if I sold it to the papers, when all the reporters arrived to check it out, there'd be dogs everywhere, shelves full of Chum at the grocer's, poop-scoops at the ironmonger's, posters for the Crybbe and District Annual Dog Show…'

She was glad they couldn't see the helpless tears in her eyes.

'I can't trust myself here,' Fay said, fighting to keep the tears out of her voice, I can't trust myself to perceive anything correctly. Too much has happened.'

'Have you thought about why it could be?' Powys asked, a soft, accepting voice in the darkness. 'Why no dogs?'

'Sure I've thought about it – in between thinking about my dad going bonkers, about holding on to my job, about somebody breaking in and smashing up my tape-machine, about being arrested for manslaughter, about living with a gho… about tons of things. I'm sorry, I'm not very rational tonight.

'So what you're saying is' – Rachel's very rational voice, 'that, because you wouldn't get rid of Arnold, Jonathon Preece deliberately set out to shoot him?'

'I had a phone call. An anonymous call. Get rid of him this weekend, or…'

'Or he'd be shot?'

'There was no specified threat. Just a warning. I think Jack Preece was the caller. Therefore it seems likely he sent Jonathon out with the gun.'

She heard Powys fumbling with the stove and its iron door was flung wide, letting a stuttering red and yellow firelight into the room.

His face looked much younger in the firelight. 'If this is right about no dogs – I'm sorry, Fay, if you say there are no dogs, I believe you – we could be looking at the key to something here.'

'You're the expert,' Fay said.

'There aren't any experts. This is the one area in which nobody's an expert.'

'If all dogs howl at the curfew,' Rachel said logically, 'why don't they just get rid of the curfew? It's not as if it's a major tourist attraction. Not as if they even draw attention to it. It just happens, it's just continued, without much being said. OK there's this story about the legacy of land to the Preeces, but is anybody really going to take that away if the curfew stops?'

'I don't think for one minute,' said Powys, 'that that's the real reason for the curfew.'

Fay sat up, interested. 'So what is the real reason?'

'If we knew that we'd know the secret of Crybbe.'

'You think there's something to know? You think there's good reason why the place is as miserable as sin?"

'There's something. Fay. how did you come to get Henry's dog. I mean, did you know him well?'

'Hardly at all. I'd done an interview with him on the day he died.'

'That's interesting. What sort of an interview? What was it about?'

'Er… dowsing. I wanted to know what he was doing in Crybbe, but it was obvious he didn't want to talk about that, so… Anyway, it was never used.'

'Have you still got the tape?'

'I imagine so. If you want to hear it, come down to the studio sometime. Up the covered alley behind the Cock.'

'Tomorrow morning?'

'Nine o'clock?'

'Fine.'

'And about Arnold, I got him from the police because it was obvious nobody else was going to. He was howling away in full daylight, and I'm pretty sure now that if I hadn't taken him, he'd have been dead. They'd have killed him. Before nightfall. Before the curfew.'

The torchlight shone in Jocasta's eyes.

'It's me,' Guy said. 'Look…'

'Yes, I know. Come here, I'm cold.'

'I haven't been,' said Guy. 'I couldn't go.'

'I don't understand – you've got the torch.'

'Jocasta,' Guy hissed urgently, closing the drawing-room door quietly behind him. 'For Christ's sake, why didn't you tell me we weren't alone?'

Jocasta felt very cold. She began to tremble, crawled to the Aga and scrabbled for her dress.

'Who is he?' Guy demanded. She couldn't see him, only the torch. Is he your father?'

Jocasta tried to speak and couldn't. She tried to stand up, tried to step into her dress, got her legs tangled, fell back on the rug.

'I waited,' Guy said. 'But he didn't come out.'

Jocasta, squatting on the rug in the torch circle, struggled vainly to zip up her dress. No eager fingers to help her now.

'What the hell's going on, Jocasta?'

She found her voice, but didn't recognize it. 'My father,' she said slowly, 'is in Chiswick. My husband, Hereward, is somewhere in Somerset. There is nobody here. Nobody here but us, Guy.'

A log shifted in the grate, sending up a yellow spark-shower, like a cheap firework.

'Then who the fuck was that old man in the bathroom? Having a shave, for crying out loud, with a… with a…' His voice faltered. 'With a cut-throat razor.'

The improbability of the scenario seemed to occur to him at last.

'How could I see him? How could I see him when all the lights

…?'

Guy's voice went quiet. 'He was a strange kind of yellow,' he said unsteadily. 'A very feeble shade of yellow.'

The torchlight wavered as he advanced on the sofa. 'Where are my clothes? I'm getting out of here.'

'No!' Jocasta leapt at him, clutching the arm which held the torch. He dropped it. It lay on the floor, its beam directed into the fireplace. The logs looked dead and grey in the strong, white light.

'Don't go,' Jocasta implored. 'You can't go. You can't leave me. For God's sake, don't leave me here with… with…'